Monday, February 13, 2012

How the CIA Started the Vietnam War


If you are the typical American, you may believe that the Vietnam War was a struggle of freedom over oppression, right vs. wrong, or maybe in some vague way about preserving the American way of life. Unfortunately, none of these reasons is correct, and were in fact part of the brain washing scheme to ensure American support for the bloody, vicious, unwinnable war. The truth is that the CIA concocted the war out of whole cloth, whose locus provided a safe haven for committing many acts of cold blooded murder in the name of fighting the war.

Fletcher Prouty is a deceased former USAF Colonel who worked in the Pentagon and closely with the CIA during 1940s-60s and who had a bird’s eye view of the development of policy during the Eisenhower administration and beyond. He relates a sordid tale of how the plutocrats had planned the Vietnam War during the last half of World War 2, and the various phases of that war resulting in a massive American invasion of the Indochinese peninsula.

Before describing the political and military aspects of the war, it is important to outline the demographic nature of the land known as Vietnam. All of Vietnam was a tribal community based loose confederation of villages whose central cohesion was ancestral worship and tribal identity. The villages were self sustaining with each family typically engaged in agriculture, farming land that had belonged to the family for centuries. This way of life had persisted unmolested for thousands of years prior to the French arrival in the late 18th century.
Under no normal circumstance would the Vietnamese abandon this ancient way of life – not even under French tutelage. The northern region was dominated by the Tonkinese ethnic group while the southern region was identified as Cochin China. The two groups were distinct and without natural affiliation but followed similar governing customs. The southern section was the more prosperous of the two, being the rice bowl of Asia. However, in no way were these regions countries in the modern sense of the term. Vietnam was an administrative district for the French but without meaning to the native Vietnamese. But that didn’t stop the CIA from pretending that a South Vietnam existed as a fully functioning state.

By the late 19th C. there were two primary influences in the region – the French and the Chinese. The French controlled banking, constabularies, justice, and their rapacious industrial enterprises such as Michelin. The Chinese provided commercial middleman services by supplying an outside market for the Vietnamese’s excess rice production, necessary goods for living, and silver for balances owed the farmer after the exchange of rice and goods.

During World War 2, the Japanese conquered the region and imposed a brutality even greater than that of the French. But the French managed to retake the region with a few armed forces, reimposing their colonial rule. At the end of World War 2, the USA sent huge quantities of arms from Okinawa to Vietnam, ostensibly to arm Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh forces who were trying to establish a free Vietnam – the Democratic Republic of Vietnam - and to preserve their ancestral customs and governance under the aegis of modern statecraft. However, the CIA had orders to subvert this Indochinese-American relationship in pursuit of higher Cold War aims which had been planned before the end of the world war.

The Chinese and French provided a source of stability and continuity although the French were deeply despised for their brutal methods and administration. The utter defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 marked an important inflection point for American involvement in Southeast Asia.

At the beginning of the year, the CIA sent in the Saigon Military Mission headed by Philippines covert operations veteran Edward Lansdale who nominally worked for the Air Force but whose real bosses were in the CIA. The purpose of the SMM was to destabilize the region and foment war, at which task they were spectacularly successful.

The SMM was the Dulles brothers’ way of circumventing President Eisenhower’s stern and adamant opposition to placing American ground troops in Vietnam, a position he declared at a National Security Council meeting on January 8, 1954 with the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff present.

The first task of the SMM was to install a pliable leader in South Vietnam. We must remember that South Vietnam did not exist as a country except on paper and in the minds of the plutocrats plotting the next 30 years of war. As we discussed above, the native government of the region was tribal and local – not national.

The CIA installed in 1954 as president of South Vietnam the Catholic Ngô Đình Diệm who had been at times in exile in the United States or Europe. His first assignment was to expel the French and Chinese which he dutifully did. This had the very perverse and intended effect of destabilizing the inchoate nation. Without the French, the legal and administrative infrastructure disappeared, and without the Chinese the economic and commercial infrastructure vanished, leaving the farmers without a market for their rice. During Diem's rule, Vietnam sunk from being a net exporter of rice to being a net importer.

To light the fuse, the CIA arranged to transport 1.1 million people in the north to the south – a figure which even John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, confirmed – using its secret and proprietary Civil Air Transport airline company stationed in Taiwan. The expense and logistical requirements for an unprecedented migration of this magnitude were enormous but funded via the CIA. As Prouty states, this would be like transplanting 1.1 million New Yorkers overnight to Alabama with all of the social and economic upheaval such a move would inspire.

The CIA had used terroristic threats to cause the Tonkinese residents to move from their ancestral homelands to a strange one in the south. They had also offered financial assistance and inducements for these people to move. The goals were anything but humanitarian.

To the good people back home in America who were busy building bomb shelters and stockpiling food and provisions, the state controlled media reported that the peace loving northerners were fleeing the communist Vietminh. This too was a lie. Ho Chi Minh had the respect and support of his people as he fought first the Japanese, then the French, and now the Americans in order to form an independent nation of Vietnam.

When the waves of Tonkinese migrants arrived in the south, they found that there was no food, shelter, or financial assistance. In short, the CIA lied – a big surprise. In need of basic necessities of life, and out of desperation, the Northerners formed bandits to steal food. They were not motivated by ideology, doctrine, or belief – it was purely and simply a matter of survival.

So the south was now plagued with three huge problems – social unrest due to massive migrations, civil disorder due to the vacuum left by the departure of the French, and economic collapse due to the departure of the Chinese. The attacking bandits were described as guerillas and insurgents to the American people and were later transmogrified into the Viet Cong.

The CIA then organized the migrants into armies and administrators – so they in effect colonized the south and became their rulers and magistrates, creating another source of antagonism. Thus the once prosperous southerners were reduced to poverty and suffered the theft of their farms and other property by the northerners.

In order to complete the antagonism necessary for war, the CIA organized the two comingled groups into "us" and "them", which ignited a confusing and hopelessly tangled set of enemies, using a sophisticated tactic which the French had passed to the CIA from its experiences in Algeria.

Thus over a period of years beginning on September 2, 1945, the end of World War 2, US plutocrats had purposefully configured Vietnam to be the locus of an unwinnable and perpetual war – at least 30 years worth. To frame the conflict as a Communist vs Capitalist conflict is a gross fraud. At no time did the North Vietnamese ever pose a threat in any way shape or form to America’s security. We shall explore the reasons for the war in another posting.

Reference
JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, Fletcher Prouty
Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Interesting post. Do you see any similarities playing out in the Middle East today?

Tony Bonn said...

yes - but with a different twist...al qaeda is a cia mercenary force which is on permanent operations to stir up trouble and to create casus belli wherever the plutocrats target next for acquisition and/or subjugation. Benghazi is a recent example of this.

but the key point about vietnam was the movement of indigenous peoples to alien lands. the cia and state department have fomented the very same thing on our southern borders. i have second hand evidence of this going back to the 1960s / 70s....the reason for mixing up people and cultures is to create turmoil, loss, and conflict - factors which play into divide and conquor control techniques. it's almost a patented cia service mark which has occurred frequently in the post war world - cambodia under pol pot being another such example.

finally the world war 1 divisions in the iraq and jordan and the world war 2 divisions in the balkans and adriatic were designed to create ethnic tensions and thus control populations.

these are my opinions of course, but they seem to fit a discernible pattern wherever the plutocrats and the cia have placed their collective foot.

Scoops said...

great article and response above. I was looking stuff about NAM and the CIA. Do you think the unrest in Iraq, Syria and Libya was strategically caused to create unrest and tension in Europe, with the influx of refugees? I told my wife this was all strategic yesterday and your post from 3 years ago makes sense.

Tony Bonn said...

I am not positive that the goal of the destruction of the countries you mentioned was a specific first order goal of the plutocrats, but they certainly exploited it as collateral damage. I am absolutely certain that they (Windsors/Rothschilds/Soros/Bush) initiated these wars, and that all of the "terrorists" are US/Israeli/Saudi/Turkish mercenaries - no doubt whatsoever. Please see our article on Libya which was an Obama/Clinton operation of wanton death and mayhem. http://www.americanchronicle.info/home/why-the-united-states-destroyed-libya.aspx?ArticleId=46&tabid=514. Iraq, Syria, Libya were specifically targeted by the aforementioned cabal no later than the 1990s as part of Project for a New American Century. Retired General Wesley Clark speaks a great deal about this. We have an article on his revelations about the takeover of the US government by the cabal.

Chrystal said...

Thanks for the excellent article. Reading your comment gave me goosebumps, now 4 years later... Very interesting with today's refugee crisis. So many victims on both sides of a conflict that they did not, themselves, create.

Tony Bonn said...

one point to add regarding the refugee turmoil is that most of them do not come from Syria - although certainly they are well represented - but from Africa, middle east, and elsewhere. NGOs such as ford, macarthur, and Rockefeller foundations, have supplied the transportation fares and shipping to inundate Europe with these manufactured "refurgees". the goal is to break down European society to make it easier for a "savior" to control which will mean more loss of freedoms and more wars. this is one reason putin has made these ngos illegal.

Beav said...

So, what was the purpose for planting the seeds of war in Vietnam?

Tony Bonn said...

conquest and drugs, plus the need to maintain the ever present fear of some communist bogeyman, which is a jewish ism to justify thesis and antithesis which is a fancy way to say perpetual war. the military industrial complex is required for those cases where money and political intimidation fail to achieve the desired outcome.